Staff Engineer: Real-Time AI & Stream Analytics

IBM; Poughkeepsie (AR); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

IBM Software is seeking an engineer to own delivery of significant pieces of our AI-powered platform, including real-time data inference on streaming data within the IBM Cloud.

As an engineer, you'll decide how capabilities work across services, spanning user-facing APIs, model lifecycle, and the orchestration that runs the work, while aligning teams and driving design decisions across boundaries.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of significant experience designing, building, and operating distributed systems or cloud-native backend infrastructure in production.
• Strong working knowledge of Kubernetes and distributed-systems patterns (control loops, API servers, high-scale control planes), plus the fundamentals — containerization, networking, resource isolation.
• Proficiency in at least one of Go, Java, or Python, and the willingness to work across all three.
• A track record of leading cross-team technical work: turning ambiguous requirements into designs others can rally behind.
• Excellent written and verbal communication — you can write a design doc that aligns people who don’t report to you.

Responsibilities

• Design and build the backend services (primarily Go, Java, and Python) that run AI and model inference on real-time data.
• Own features end to end — drafting the design, aligning stakeholders inside and outside the team, and driving the decision to a conclusion.
• Make the technical calls on systems that span teams: model lifecycle, inference routing, and agent execution.
• Own the quality of what you ship — code, test coverage, documentation, operability, and rollout safety. This is production infrastructure serving live inference, so reliability isn't an afterthought.
• Make the engineers around you better through code review, design feedback, and being someone the team trusts with ambiguous, cross-cutting work.
• Participate in on-call for the services your team owns, and help keep the team's processes and rituals healthy.

Skills

Kubernetes

Distributed systems

Go/Java/Python

Cross-team leadership

Technical communication

Education

Master's Degree

Job description

IBM Software is seeking an engineer to own delivery of significant pieces of our AI-powered platform, including real-time data inference on streaming data within the IBM Cloud.

As an engineer, you'll decide how capabilities work across services, spanning user-facing APIs, model lifecycle, and the orchestration that runs the work, while aligning teams and driving design decisions across boundaries.